Are charitable food businesses the wave of the future? We see how San Francisco’s Mission Street Food went from taco truck to charitable benefactor in almost no time.
When former Bar Tartine cook Anthony Myint and his wife Karen Leibowitz set out to create a foodie distraction with which to occupy their spare time, they didn’t expect their taco truck sublet to turn into a local phenomenon with national attention. But thanks to their impeccable taste and timing (street food is in!) as well as with the help of the San Francisco Bay Area’s Internet savvy and food-obsessed denizens, their Mission Street Food experiment has since grown into a twice-weekly food event that amasses crowds outside of an otherwise lackluster Chinese restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District.
The success of these nights has also transformed Mission Street Food into a serious charitable business, as more than $17,000 was donated to local charities during the part-time restaurant’s first 10 months of operation. Mission Burger, a lunchtime burger stand that Myint started inside the Duc Loi Supermarket a couple doors down from Mission Street Food, has also generated more than $2,500 in donations during its first three months of operation. Read the rest of this entry »
We have our bags packed and ready, but we need a destination.
Is there an individual or organization you know about that’s finding new and innovative ways to create change in your community? If you do, tell us about it, and we may make your nominee the subject of our next video.
The Quotidian is looking to produce original short video documentaries (under 10 minutes) about people doing good for their communities. Subjects can range from an individual taking personal initiative to improve the well-being of homeless people in his neighborhood to a local business that donates a percentage of sales to charity, for example.
Though not a necessary requirement, we’d love to tell stories that are in the development stage – whether it’s someone starting an innovative social program or a nonprofit pushing for widespread community action. We feel that focusing on the development phase of a particular action enables us to not only tell a potentially more captivating story, but a more inspirational one for the budding social entrepreneurs and volunteers of tomorrow. Our videos aim to not only explore the work of a particular individual or organization, but to also demonstrate how we can all participate in doing a world of good.
In particular, we’d love to get out of the social innovation incubation center known as the Bay Area and see how people are doing good in other parts of the country. Is there a grassroots movement to get schoolkids to help green parks? Read the rest of this entry »
If you think we’ve been antisocial of late, please don’t take it personally. We try to explain.
There have been some questions about why The Quotidian has been a little quiet lately, and so I wanted to let everyone know about what has been developing in the past few weeks.
I started The Quotidian a few months ago with the purpose of thinking more deeply about how our everyday actions – from buying light bulbs to consuming meat – affect the larger world, and by using essays and commentary to dig deeper than your average blog to contextualize these issues in a fresh way.
It was important that we didn’t just reflect on the issues, however, but to also show what people were trying to do about them, and there seemed no better way to capture how change is happening in our communities than with shortform video documentaries that bring these actions and movements to life.
The hypnotizing power of video is, of course, nothing new and it’s no secret that online video has become an incredibly powerful medium that continues to grow not only in viewership but in quality and distribution opportunities. But with more people watching than ever, are the stories of people creating societal change at the grassroots level being given enough opportunity to be told?
The Quotidian can better fulfill its mission of educating and inspiring people about how any individual can do good for his or her community by focusing on the production of short video documentaries about these efforts. Read the rest of this entry »
As the real-world benefits of buying local and organic food prove to be negligible, is going veggie our only hope?
If switching from incandescent to CFL light bulbs is a first step towards indoctrination into the modern environmental and progressive movement, then eating locally is surely a close second, with a dedication from Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemmabefore every meal. But even amongst those who haven’t read Pollan’s ode to locally grown, traditionally prepared food that would make your grandmother salivate, there’s been an obvious renewed interest in farmer’s markets and organic produce with a pushback against the industrialization of the food industry in recent years.
On a certain level, this passion for foodie culture is a perfect example of DIY grassroots activism done right, with a populist message and tangible results that can be achieved quickly and cheaply. Nearly anyone can make a consumer choice to support local farmers, especially with the number of farmers markets in this country nearly doubling in the past decade. Or better yet, anyone can grow their own vegetables, a trend confirmed by the White House gardens started by first lady Michelle Obama earlier this year. There’s also the issues the modern food movement touches upon – ranging from health to poverty and consumerism – that are far from controversial no matter what side of the ideological seismic fault you happen to be on. Read the rest of this entry »
Is outsourcing medical services using digital technology the way to slash health care costs?
via Associated Press
Lest we forget that the ongoing discussiondebate firestorm about health care is not only about ideology – however real or falsified – but also about fundamental economic costs. No matter which reform camp you’re in – or even if you’re against any reform at all – most will agree that increasing health care costs by almost 10 percent yearly and having employees shoulder more of the costs is an unsustainable trend under any health care system.
So the question remains: just how are we going to reduce costs? Sure, there’s been lots of talk about increasing competition between plans, making generic drugs more available and eliminating many of the bureaucratic redundancies that siphon off more money than is necessary.
For example, one of Obama’s main strategies to reduce costs is by creating a digital medical record system, which by some estimates could save $200 to $300 billion a year – though implementation won’t be easy. Having a digital database is long overdue and a no-brainer – it’s simply prodding the health industry towards the 21st century and in line with the zeitgeist of the times.
But what about more radical approaches that infuse technology into the actual care itself? Read the rest of this entry »
Government-sponsored nonprofit health care may seem like a worthy alternative to the public option – but it doesn’t really guarantee lower costs for anybody.
Much has been made in this raging cacophonic health care debate about how there is no need or desire to emulate the Canadian or British health care systems, that what we need is an American way – which presumably means a mixed public-private system with a heavy emphasis on the latter. With an almost perfect storm of partisanship, corporate money and fearmongering coming together in Congress, chances for a purely public-run health care provider to come to fruition were always going to be slim at best.
Even the skeptics acknowledge that the time for reform – no matter how trivial or revolutionary – has come, even with the question of the public option still left unanswered. Read the rest of this entry »
A new book examines the real price we pay to have consumer goods at relatively low cost – but offers few ideas to get us out of the mess.
One of the joys of an undergraduate economics education is the feeling that comes over you during your first or second year of having been inducted into a secret society – a sort of Harry Potter world with its own language, its own subculture, and its own special selection of intellectual tools. These are almost like little magic spells that allow you to see the world in a different way: as a world of hidden relations and counterintuitive mechanisms, a world that the Muggles can’t see though it’s right there in front of them.
Of course, this feeling is illusory, and soon fades – not just because real economics is a bit messier than the introductory stuff, but also because just about anyone can learn these basic tools and easily apply them to journalistic effect.
For example, take the concept of externalities. Freshman economics students discover that only some small subset of the costs and benefits of a transaction are explicitly reflected in the price. Read the rest of this entry »
Can a single individual make a dent into homelessness in America? Here’s how a growing movement is tackling the problem – with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in hand.
But how can a single person make a difference within all of this? That’s where the Peanut Butter Plan comes in. Started by 826 Valencia programs director and all-around inspiration Jory John, the growing movement asks participants to gather all your friends to make peanut butter sandwiches – that cornerstone of any good American diet – at least once a month to hand out directly to those in need. A loaf of bread, peanut butter and jelly can feed a dozen people while costing you only about $10-20 and a bit of your time. Read the rest of this entry »
With the program’s environmental and economic benefits nearly negligible, billions could have been better spent encouraging more people to buy cars that make a real difference – plug-in hybrids.
On one level, cash for clunkers could be deemed a success – the program has so far increased sales in its brief period of activity, with Ford posting its first sales increase in two years and the overall industry posting its best month of 2009. The overwhelming popularity of the program has also been lauded as a measure of its success (or irresponsibility), with $1 billion exhausted in $4,500 increments in just one week.
The banning of incandescent light bulbs has been seen as a major victory for the environmental movement – but now they’re making a comeback. Here’s why.
via pathsoflight.us
The quintessential, iconic action of the contemporary green movement has been changing your light bulb from the warm, soft rays of the 19th-century incandescent light bulb to the super-efficient yet somewhat muted compact fluorescent (CFL) bulb. Making the switch is an obvious choice, no matter if your priorities are economical or environmental – a CFL bulb promises savings of more than $30 over the course of its longer lifespan while also slowing the emission of greenhouse gases due to its reduced energy use.
One could see the CFL bulb as forming a sort of subliminal trinity for optimists and changemakers worldwide – switching to the new bulbs is demonstrably world-changing and cost-cutting at the same time, as well as being able to affect sweeping legislative changes in a relatively short amount of time. Unsurprisingly, the EU and Canada are on track to phase out old-school incandescents in the next few years, and even the U.S. is in the mix with a 2012 target date (though Venezuela and Cuba beat us all by banning them back in 2005). Read the rest of this entry »
The problem with American automakers is not that “liberals” prefer buying foreign brands, but rather that American automakers have a severe branding problem.
via BusinessInsider.com
To follow up and expand on my last post, I began thinking about my own personal consumer choices and how many of them could be considered “American.” While there is much acrimony about the supposed decline of America as a brand in the world (both commercially and politically), I think that there is still a ways to fall before we reach an absolute crisis.
Charles J. Brown of Undiplomatic wrote in the Huffington Post recently about, among other things, the problematic perception that American brands enjoy among “lefty/coastie/academic community” liberals. We’re all probably guilty of it in some way or form – it is, as Brown asserts, as part of our self-image as “lattes, Whole Foods, yoga, and Mac laptops.”
Obama’s push for all of us to “Buy American” should make us realize the need for real, raw information to be made readily available to consumers.
via NotionsCapital.com
Going to work today, I took a train made by an Italian company that was assembled here in California while sipping Ethiopian coffee and reading a book printed in China – a now almost-archetypal scenario replicated across communities throughout the U.S. with interchangeable products and origins. Whether it’s a car instead of a train or Mexico instead of China, it’s nothing new to say that our economy has long been inevitably and inextricably global.
Which is why President Obama’s push for all of us to “Buy American” seemed to be a very obvious rhetorical device aimed at placating the xenophobic masses. Indeed, we all know that conditions of “free trade” are often deplorable at best, but there is no return to a feudalistic retrofuturism when a global system of trade has been interjecting into our daily lives throughout the last millennia (or longer).
But what has changed in our lifetime is that global capitalism has gotten so complex and shape-shifting that we’ve long needed a redefinition of what “Buy American” really means.
A recent article in the New York Times that tried to sort out the anguishing identity crises of labeling automobiles as “American” or “foreign” found that:
… “domestic content” is not domestic at all. For the purposes of the window sticker, the government has decided that domestic content will include parts made in Canada. Under the North American Free Trade Act, domestic is even less clear because it also includes Mexico.
If you’ve ever wondered what else could be done with a single parking space – here are some ideas.
With PARK(ing) Day 2009 fast approaching, here’s a look back at some of the wonderful projects people came up with for the event in San Francisco a couple years back.
If you’re not familiar, PARK(ing) Day is a one-day, worldwide event that raises awareness about the use of public space and urban planning issues by transforming parking spaces into public parks, guerrilla-style. Ordinary citizens take over one or more parking spaces for the day by feeding the meter and then reinventing their borrowed space by installing a putting green, croquet course, or even a chicken farm.
The San Francisco-based creative collective Rebar started the event in 2005, and it’s been growing steadily every year with more and more cities across the country and the world participating.
I hope that this video will give you an impression of what an amazing and transformational event this can be. Also, given that PARK(ing) Day 2009 is roughly three months from now, this is the perfect time to start planning your own project for September 18. Check out the PARK(ing) Day 2009 Web site that’s been revamped with wonderful digital tools to help you get inspired and started with a project of your own.
Thanks to Sarah Evershed for her help with producing parts of this piece, which was shot entirely on a Flip camera.
Recently, a parking space in Boston was purchased for $300,000. What implications does this sale have on our transportation future?
Courtesy wbz.com
Apparently no one told the buyer of a $300,000 parking space in Boston that there’s a recession going on. Yes, that’s right – a parking space recently sold in the upscale Back Bay neighborhood of Boston for more than the value of most homes in the U.S.
Paying exorbitant prices for a slice of personal pavement might be a growing trend in places like Boston, as the winning bidders for the uncovered, outdoor space beat the previous city record of $250,000 that was set just last year by another space in the same neighborhood. At the moment, Boston might even have New York beat for the most expensive parking space in the country, as a space in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood went for a mere $225,000 a couple years ago amidst some publicity.
The growing trend in the U.S. of “re-urbanization,” a reversal of post-war flight to the suburbs that now sees the middle class re-orientating towards city centers has been seen by many as necessary to reduce carbon footprints and create more sustainable communities. With density as a key mantra of the movement towards sustainable development, apartments and condos appealing to the middle class have been rising in central areas of cities everywhere from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, offering alternatives to the long commutes and reliance on cars that often plague suburban living.
It’s clear that living in more compact spaces and owning only one car may be a price that more people, especially young professionals and empty nesters, are now willing to pay to be closer to work or local shops and businesses. The surging trend has manifested itself in the various urban renewal projects across the country in recent decades, as well as an increased popularity in the planning ideas of New Urbanism for suburban developments.
However, the $300,000 question becomes twofold for those interested in sustainable development – whether people are willing to dramatically reconsider the role of the automobile in their daily lives, and whether re-urbanization will be economically and socially inclusive. Read the rest of this entry »
Back from the desert and now in edit lockdown for our next video on Party Corps – stay tuned for news about its release in the coming weeks. 2 months ago
Thanks Tucson for showing me fantastic people doing amazing work, for sharing your inspirational stories – and for free airport wifi. 2 months ago
Getting ready to cross the border into Nogales - sort of the Tijuana of the Arizona border. 2 months ago
There have been some questions about why The Quotidian has been a little quiet lately, and so I wanted to let everyone know about what has been developing in the past few weeks.
capitalism, consumerism, economics, environment, farming, food, gardening, globalization, gmo, green, localism, locavore, meat, organic, poverty, slow food, urban farming, vegetarian
The locavore myth or why vegetarians will save the world
In Commentary, News on 2009/10/01 at 6:41 amAs the real-world benefits of buying local and organic food prove to be negligible, is going veggie our only hope?
On a certain level, this passion for foodie culture is a perfect example of DIY grassroots activism done right, with a populist message and tangible results that can be achieved quickly and cheaply. Nearly anyone can make a consumer choice to support local farmers, especially with the number of farmers markets in this country nearly doubling in the past decade. Or better yet, anyone can grow their own vegetables, a trend confirmed by the White House gardens started by first lady Michelle Obama earlier this year. There’s also the issues the modern food movement touches upon – ranging from health to poverty and consumerism – that are far from controversial no matter what side of the ideological seismic fault you happen to be on. Read the rest of this entry »